“Nothing will come of nothing”

“The most difficult thing in the play is to make Cordelia saying ‘nothing’ makes sense,” says the director Sam Mendes, “since something would be much easier to tell him she loves him.” He adds that “Lear had not heard the word ‘no’ for 20 years.” Sam indicates the confusion the audience may have. The actor who portrays Cordelia gives her interpretation that Cordelia knew how great Lear was once and that had disappeared as he became more dictatorial. Cordelia firmly believed the right thing is not to flatter her father and she was not going to play the game.

As a collection of commentaries, across fragments of performance on the stage, this video impresses me with plentiful different perspectives towards the great work of King Lear. The actors and actress portray vivid images based on their comprehension and imagination of the characters; as a result, they are likely to feel their own characters’ feelings on the stage. Through listening to their different feelings, luckily, I learned to explore the inner activities of Lear, Cordelia, Goneril, Regan, Edmund and so on, which persuades me to feel why Goneril and Regan hate their father, and how the relationship is like between Lear and Regan; I think the performers are good readers and interpreters of Shakespeare.

Meanwhile, these commentaries stimulate me to think that it is not just a matter of right or wrong, but a matter of the complexity of humanity and love. In this Shakespeare’s tragedy, everyone was tragic concerning not only about their endings but also about their growing processes.

The intensive conflicts make King Lear thrilling, magnifying the darkness. Honestly, it is not easy to keep sound wisdom all the time especially there is dictatorship; instead, people are likely to be fooled by the appearance, and the process of knowing the truth comes to be sorrow, as it was for King Lear.